violet_crown
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AV Club posted their review of the first episode. They brought up two points about the series and this season in particular that I found really interesting:
AV Club said:That new story, however, gives a better sense of what Murphy and Falchuk value about horror, beyond mere shock scares and moments of sexual transgression. For starters, the show’s constant belief that horror is tied as much to place as any other factor returns. In the universe of this show, evil grows in tendrils from a central location, and once your life touches that location in some small way, it’s forever cursed.
AV Club said:What’s fascinating about this isn’t just how remarkably streamlined it is for how much it has going on, but also how Murphy, Falchuk, and their writers seem to almost be—in their own earnestly clumsy way—attempting to tell the flipside of a series like Mad Men, which is firmly set from the point-of-view of the status quo, that viewers might watch the cataclysmic change of the ‘60s from people who were relatively unaffected by it (save maybe Peggy). Asylum, then, is largely about the status quo’s attempt to deal with threats to its dominance and certainty, be those threats people in homosexual relationships or people in interracial marriages or any number of other things. To be sure, this is all conveyed in just about the most obvious way possible—there’s none of Mad Men’s weird lyricism, and the show doesn’t want weird lyricism—but it already gives the season a firmer foundation than season one ever had. In a twisted way, this is a workplace drama, and like many other workplace dramas over the years, it’s going to tackle Important Social Issues, usually through speechifying and exposition.